


one more time with feeling

by TheJGatsby



Series: potentially lovely perpetually human [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 20:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5715673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Who are you?" "Someone that loves you."<br/>(Or, a quote in a different context)</p>
            </blockquote>





	one more time with feeling

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while ago just for shits n' giggles and there's kind of a dearth of Reylo fic so.  
> Update: published before but set after 'good is better than perfect'

At this point, Rey should honestly be used to waking up restrained in small, locked rooms. She kind of is, if the fact that she feels more exasperated than afraid is anything to go by. But she’s never not gotten out of a situation like this one, so she’s a lot less worried than she probably should be. So she just reaches out with the Force to unlock her restraints, as she’s done a dozen times before.

Except, she can’t. She can’t seem to reach the Force… at all. Exasperation is replaced by blind panic as the absence of the Force, the sixth sense she’s started to depend on, becomes abundantly clear. Luke had warned her about this, restraints made of Force-nullifying materials, significantly rarer since the need for them disappeared with the Jedi, but, obviously, still a very real threat. It feels pathetic, that she’s come to rely so heavily on the Force that her first reaction to its lack is to freak out instead of remembering that she was resourceful and creative and tough before she was Force trained, but after a moment she starts scanning the room for anything she can use to break herself out.

It’s completely empty, just a sandstone box with a metal door and a tiny, barred window just below the ceiling. It isn’t a room meant to hold a prisoner for a long time, not more than a day or two at most, so that means that not only is she trapped, Forceless, and without any sort of tools, but on a time limit as well. “Serves me right for getting cocky,” she mutters to herself.

* * *

Ben moves easily through the halls of the Hutt’s lair, disguised by his stolen bounty hunter armor and a Force trick that makes him seem unremarkable to anyone who sees him. He’s also reaching out periodically with the Force, feeling for her presence in the absolute dump of a “palace,” and he can feel her, nearby, but she’s strangely… muffled? Her Force presence is usually screamingly obvious, almost offensive in its brightness, but it’s like she’s been gagged, and he’s… concerned. Well, verging on terrified is probably more accurate, but he’s still holding fast to the last shreds of denial when it comes to how much he cares about her, so he pretends the gnawing, heavy feeling in his chest is something as mild as concern.

She doesn’t feel like his enemy. She hasn’t in so fucking long.

He can feel her presence growing nearer, but no less weak. What if she’s hurt, or worse? He’s felt Force echoes of dead Jedi before, in the temple on Coruscant, and they didn’t feel quite like this, but that doesn’t mean much, because there’s still so much about the Force he doesn’t know, that no one knows, lost with the Jedi Masters of old. So he presses on, fear and hope in equal measure.

It’s no challenge to hack the lock on the door, slicing it open in seconds. It’s like the Hutt isn’t even trying- either he’s laid a trap or he feels utterly confident that no one would come for her and she wouldn’t get out on her own. When Ben steps into the cell, she’s on the floor beating her restraints against the ground. Her hands are scraped and bleeding, and she leaps to her feet and pulls back to club him, her fists linked together. He dodges easily and hisses, “Stop it, I’m here to rescue you,” his voice garbled by the helmet's vocoder.

She looks at him warily, still stanced to attack. “I don’t need rescuing, I can take care of myself.”

“Of course,” he says, “but this is faster. Give me your hands.” He reaches out with the Force, breaking the lock on the restraints, and as they fall to the ground, her Force presence comes flooding back like a tidal wave, and he’s overwhelmed for a moment. So they were Force-nullifying, then. He used to wear nullifiers during combat training sometimes, to teach him how to work without the Force, and even when you know what’s happening there’s nothing like the empty feeling of being without the Force, its absence glaring and painful like a missing limb. The only thing worse was when Snoke would put him in nullifiers as part of a punishment- choosing to handicap himself was one thing, having a vital sense taken away from him against his will was a different and exponentially more awful animal.

He doesn’t want to pity her, because it’d feel far too disrespectful, but it makes him ache a little that she had to experience that.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“You can use the Force!” she exclaims, hurrying after him. He doesn’t respond and slows his long strides so she can keep up. She doesn’t say anything else, but he can feel her poking at his mind, trying to get into it, and he throws up walls and shields and locks her out- she can’t know who he is, she’d run immediately, and he has to get her out of here before the Hutt finds out she’s missing.

There’s a commotion going on in the main room of the Hutt’s palace, so it’s easy for Ben to smuggle Rey out through the back of the room, and as soon as they’re clear he grabs her hand, tries not to think about how small it is in his, and starts running. They make it to his “borrowed” speeder and he tugs her up behind him, almost choking when her arms lock around his waist, barely managing to say, “Where’s the Fal- uh, your ship?”

She points. “That way.”

As soon as he pulls up on the speeder next to the Falcon, Chewie comes running out with a warbled cry, Finn and Poe not far behind. They hug her with relieved exclamations and Ben expects to feel jealousy but instead just feels a sense of longing. He grips the handlebars of his speeder a little tighter and gets ready to leave.

“Wait,” Rey says, hurrying over. “Who are you?”

She’s studying the eye-slits of his helmet intensely, as if she can see past them just by trying hard enough. For a moment he considers telling her, considers taking off the helmet and letting her see that he’s not always going to hurt her, that the last thing he wants is to hurt her, to prove to her he can be brave and self-sacrificing and gentle. But it passes, because he knows that she’ll just think it’s a trap- no one knows he’s defected from the First Order, from Snoke, from the Dark Side itself. Hux is making sure of that, fueling rumors of him wreaking havoc across the galaxy, killing and maiming and committing acts so barbarous that, even in his most passionate moments, even at the times he was trying hardest to be dark, he wouldn’t have even considered doing. It makes him sick, to think that people might believe the rumors, that someone, the resistance, Rey, stars, his  _ mother _ , might think him capable of doing the kinds of things Hux wants the galaxy to believe he’s done. He turns away from her, and he can’t tell her the truth about who he is, so he tells her a different truth, one he could never say aloud if he was speaking to her as himself instead of her mysterious rescuer.

“Someone who loves you.”

He kicks the speeder and rides away.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


End file.
